And our final speaker of the day is Professor Koji Nakamura,
who's a professor emeritus of international education at the Canadian University in Japan.
We are delighted that Kohji is a friend of Artspace. He has joined us on previous occasions and he's been in touch with us over the years.
And what strikes me about Kohji, he's a personal inspiration to me.
He brings his intellect, his life experience, especially in Japan and really a great deal of passion to this subject.
So a true inspiration.
And this is why also we wanted him to be the closing speaker for the entire day, because he's going to encourage us because of his geography,
because of where he was born, because of what he essentially can appreciate in a more proximate way than many of us can.
His message is very important to us. And so, Professor Nakamura, my friend, Koji, you have the floor.
Thank you. The better. Can you hear me? Perfect. Thank you.
And also good. Good evening, everyone. Local time in Japan is now nine o'clock and you must be very hungry for lunch.
I haven't eaten dinner, but I'll do my best as time is running out.
The topic is the dilemma for education and peace.
My educational philosophy is cultivating humanity by universalising the human crisis of other races.
Others as our own.
And I have worked for peace education for nearly forty seven years and that a key concept one is Article nine and Japan's constitutional pacifism,
which secure peace and security major. This is very important.
No. Two Historical Resonantly Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945 and also NPT in 1976 and also TPN double today.
Discuss what to discuss 2017.
And this year, number three, the tragedy of Fukushima nuclear weapon, nuclear power plants, which has melted away in 2011, still very serious.
It's not finished.
It takes another 40 years to clean the water and contaminated water now before the challenge of the pandemic coronavirus this year and last year.
And these fact have global implications for sustainable peace and human survival.
And let me just reveal the significance of our Article nine of the Japanese constitution,
the Constitution, Article nine declare the Japanese people forever denounce war,
the sovereign right of the nation, and the threat of the use of force as a means of settling international dispute.
This is why this was established in 1946.
For the past 75 years, no Japanese self-defence forces, no Japanese police officer kill any single international person.
And this is our pride, very important. But we have the charity Public Opinion's.
This is this May 3rd, this is the day of the Constitution Day,
32 percent of Japanese people do not want to reform the Article nine of the Constitution and 63 percent of those who keep that.
I believe that it is the most important part of the constitutional pacifism.
And this is very encouraging and I am impressed. Eighty percent of Japanese women do not want to reform the Article nine.
This is very important, but still 28 percent want to reform the arginine.
They support the ruling party's change of constitutions.
And another survey, 76 percent feel the Article nine of Japanese constitution has contributed to peace and security after
the World War and also 56 percent believe the Article nine prevented Japan from becoming militarily DU.
But we have a dilemma. The former prime minister of a changed Japan, what is called a normal country,
which can start a war, and our sitting prime minister succeeded this policy.
Number one, the Japanese army export ban, which we are very proud of since 1967, was abolished in 2014,
which allowed the transfer of the military defence facilities to foreign countries.
This is what is called dangerous trade.
From our point of view. Very dangerous number to the ruling party always emphasised a new interpretation of the Japanese constitution,
which allow the collective security with the US and allied nations, which goes against our Constitution.
Another reality and the dilemma is that despite the fact many of our culture and Larry in the Hiroshima city
calling on Japan's government to join the TPN double and all the intellectuals and educators supported,
but Japan will not join in and double,
the government spokesman said clearly because we are under the umbrella by the USA in terms of the deterrent power.
And the point is, no. For the former secretary general of LDP, our leading ruling parties, he is very conservative and also a very Right-Wing Person.
However, he said. Japan should maintain Article nine of the Japanese constitution, by all means,
because he participated in the eastern Pacific War and experienced the atrocity and tragedies of the war and he died.
OK, now Peace Studies Symposium is very important,
which was sponsored by the Hiroshima city and Hiroshima Prefecture and Board of Education every year they.
Hold the symposium for the public school teachers and many teachers came here and also they held the symposium in Kobe, Tokyo, Osaka,
Yokohama, and teachers studied and trained to take their students to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki school excursion is very important.
Almost all the Japanese public school student, elementary school, junior high school go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and last year twenty two thousand four hundred eighty eight elementary schools visited.
And also in the course of peace studies, 900 nearly 1000 junior high schools also visited Hiroshima.
One of the very junior high school in Kobe visited Hiroshima, all seniors, students,
and they declared peace declaration by themselves and they sang the peaceful song, peaceful song for the citizens.
Also piano, which survived after Hiroshima bombing.
We had a recital in Asia in Tokyo Prefecture and is about to shot.
The survivor of the bombing gave a lecture and an old many, many students listened.
And this is very important to Liz. Then what is a dilemma in public schools after the atomic bomb and the courts into the past?
Average age of the survivor is now 83. It's very difficult to rescind directory and teachers who lead peace.
Education efforts were born after the war. And the baby boomers and my teacher always say no war, no weapons, no nuclear weapons every day.
So automatically we have the action to avoid the war.
But young people today depend on their education.
The problem is the crisis for peace and human rights.
Education, who used to have lots in a week. Has cut off and decreased by academic pressure with a numerical goals, efficiency,
profitability, encouraged by the government, and this is very serious.
But he knows about his cultural foundation, encourage Novosel to study course, and many university is now taking advantage of this programmes.
And we are very proud of our City University, which has Institute for Peace and also Hiroshima University.
National University has a Dr. Post Graduate School for Peace Studies like Oxford.
In my class, I have put my student teacher to make a presentation about Hiroshima and also nuclear weapons.
And the nuclear test, by making presentations to man has become much more powerful.
And they will frewer the peace for public schools after graduation.
And according to my research, about 89 percent of my students support Article nine and.
The question is, should we export weapons, fortunately, about 70 percent of our students disagree, do not export weapons.
But recently, because North Korea is a threat and the Japanese government propaganda,
forty three point two percent agreed to strengthen Japan's defence, this is very serious.
So we have a contradiction and a dilemma that we have a wonderful.
Great of the fires, this was fire fries made by DeBerry's animated film for Peace and also Peace Note,
and every school in Schimmer has a library for Peace know.
As a professor of the gyppy International Cooperation Agency, I invited many professors and young researchers and doctors in a to the peace studies.
And I'm very much impressed by the young people from Asia.
They study very hard, the peace and the Japanese constitution.
And this is like for my journal and the artist is wonderful.
That's why amongst the JICA students participant, they are adults, 80, 93 percent agree.
Article nine of the Japanese constitution. We don't have to change this, that we have a pillar of the peace.
No one is three non-nuclear principles. We cannot manufacture, we cannot possess, which are not introduced.
We cannot sell nuclear weapons to other countries. And Tokyo's compliance with the NPT, but we have a contradiction.
Tokyo defiance on the US extended nuclear. Then call city in my city has a nuclear weapons free port since 1975, which is very important.
My solution is European people. You have OSCE Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
This is very important to prevent a war which should be applied in ASEAN nations in Southeast Asia.
Good news. I'm going to finish very quickly.
Last month, the three LDP, the ruling party, lost their seats because of the make up election and constitutional Democratic Party,
the major opposition party got three seats.
This is good news. Now, the principle is the what is the intellectuals?
We intellectuals. The task should be expressed to anniversary the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered,
and to associate with that experience with the suffering of others as it was a side said nineteen nineteen ninety three.
That's why President Obama came to Hiroshima.
We are very much impressed and he held a very emotional embrace with hibakusha, nuclear survivors.
And we have a morning light that she is the undersecretary general of the United
Nations and she gave a lectures for young people and for people in Japan,
young people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is now creating the virtual visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Museum from all over the world.
This is very important. But she is anticipating nuclear war happening in East Asia here or Middle East.
No winners and Japan should be observer.
We are supporting this idea in this U.N. nuclear abolition.
We have fantastic materials for peace, especially mothers.
Prior, all my students, graduate students and undergraduate cried after watching this one.
And this would really increase the awareness.
Even the many American exchange students, those who believe it was the right to use nuclear weapons, but they changed it, transformed their awareness.
And also the U.S. has many, many good. OK, so it was I said you cannot deal with others without a profound knowledge of the culture.
Society and force never works because we cannot destroy the will of people.
This is very true. I was a member of Comparative International Education Society before George Bush had ordered to attack Iraq.
We wrote the petition and asked not to attack Iraq, but they together with Tony Blair, they started a war.
Now, the result is many terrorists in the east.
So my suggestion, final suggestion is. I know North Korea develop nuclear weapons and this threat, but.
We know two million. North Korean people are now dying of hunger, famine this year,
so humanitarian support to North Korea is very important, more important than sanctions and containment policy.
This is my. In conclusion, the both of no no more Hiroshima, no more Narasaki and no more Fukushima should not be silenced.
There should be global resonance of these voices for the sake of human survival.
When I was a junior high school student, we learnt this word.
Finally, Dr. King, Martin Luther King said, We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish together as a food.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Kohji, Professor Nakamura, for those comments, I was struck, of course also the generational shift.
We talked about it in a slightly different context in the earlier exchange, but here you're also contending with a generational shift.
I really appreciated the experiential aspects of learning the visits to Hiroshima,
the listening to the piano that survived the bombing, the incredible new materials that are being prepared.
It's really very, very impressive and the testimony of survivors and so forth.
And then finally, a note that in two different ways. You mentioned one was empathy.
I mean, you saw the empathy literally between world leaders and the difference that that could make and contributing to understanding.
And then the very final quotations are really about solidarity, which aside from a personal relationship on a global scale,
to really feel that we have much in common with everyone else all around the world and that we all must take care of one another.
So thank you for the very unique overview that really only you could bring to us.
And it will give us much more reflection. I am extremely mindful of the time.
I have one question that actually appeared from an earlier session, which I'd like to pose to the panellists from this one one minute each.
And this is a pretty good timekeeper. And then we'll turn to Liz for closing comments anymore.
A few minutes we might have for additional observations about the day.
The question that came in had to do with what about the creative and spiritual and emotional elements of our shared humanity?
How could this better inform the peace, dialogue and the dialogue about nuclear weapons and what difference might that make?
So I'm going to begin in the order that we presented.
So first, Jeremy, for one moment, a minute of observations and then Jamie and then finally Kohji and then Kohji you can hand off to your friend Liz.
Thank you. Yeah, I think the school curriculum has to be reformed for us to be able to better face the challenges that face humanity.
And actually I did a little bit of personal investigation through my family, and I have some relations in Berlin.
And these students have had quite a good education in this subject through a variety of subjects,
physics, where they study the actual mechanism of nuclear fission and fusion in literature.
They study the play about the development of nuclear weapons.
And in in German, I think now or in history, they were studying the politics.
But but clearly, this is a subject that could be in a range of different different contexts.
I'm quite encouraged by the fact that religious studies tackles this issue.
It just probably doesn't have enough time on the on the knowledge feature.
But an American teacher who I contacted in this research said that she always reads to Ten Days, the John Hersey book on Hiroshima.
And it has an incredible as literature. So that's in the literature course.
So I think we can spread the knowledge of this through a range of subjects.
Thank you, that's a wonderful multidisciplinary insight, which is something that is core to also how these approaches everything it does during.
Thanks so much for this question, so I'll just point out that I think a key aspect of leading towards this discussion and eventual
ratification of the TPN w where these conferences on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons issues.
So it's kind of zoom out from that. I think what often, unfortunately, is missing from the nuclear dialogue is, you know,
the reality check of what we're talking about are massively destructive weapons.
Right. And I think it's something that we as nuclear scholars in particular and as scholars need to constantly be reminding ourselves of.
Right at the end of the day, these are weapons that could have massive global destructive impact.
And so I think regardless of which side of this conversation you fall into,
whether you fall into the firm disarmament position or you still believe that nuclear weapons do serve an effective deterrent purpose,
I think it is critical that you address that from this humanitarian aspect.
Right. And so I think that the start the disarmament side of things does that really well and effective.
And it resonates quite a bit with public, with the public.
And I think there's much more room for opportunity for those on the deterrent side of the spectrum to discuss how, you know, from their perspective,
being having nuclear weapons and maintaining these arsenals helps prevent these massive conflicts that define a generation.
Right.
And so that's something I think that Scott Sagan has spoken about, how deterrence advocates need to address this side of the conversation as well.
And nuclear scholars as a whole should be keeping that in mind.
Thank you so much, Jamie, and your comments also brought to mind the power of the imagination, focussing on the positive vision,
but also you reminded that the imagination can also appreciate the destructive vision of what we're dealing with here.
And in some sense, those two forces are intention. Thank you.
And finally, Kohji bravery, family, education and public school school education, for example, President Truman, who ordered to use nuclear weapons.
However, his granddaughter read the atomic bomb poetries and he found the picture stories
and he led the search kind of peaceful stories and poetry for children.
And that's why humour change. And another thing is the school education.
We teachers are not only teaching facts, but also we are activist.
This is very important. We are not machines, but we must be very careful the government try to control.
Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you, Koji and Liz, thank you very much.
And leaving it to Liz for concluding remarks and thanks to.
Well, it falls to me to say a very warm thank you to everybody who has made this conference happen this morning.
Thank you from all of us to all of you speakers and hosts.
And to Marilena, who has kept us all together as Zouma host in the background.
Thank you, Erlinda. So a greeting of peace from Oxford and I think from all of us to all of us,
and may we use the information that we've learnt this morning to take us forward, to inform others,
to inform our own action as part of civil society and may the world come to a better,
more sensible, more empathetic place on this and other subjects of peace and conflict.
So thank you very much. That ends the conference formerly.