Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

U.N. Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Environmentalist Noel Brown, and the story of NYC's Hottest Activist Nightclub at the GLOBAL PEACE FILM FESTIVAL JAPAN

As well as screening the shaktipat-reverberating Dalai Lama Renaissance and Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Rock Club, a documentary about NYC's eco-activist underground music club (circa 1989-2001), the GPFF-Japan in Echizen will also include the participation of two global luminaries.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States, and a native of Bangladesh, is a champion for marginalized people and nations, as well as the culture of peace. Commending the city of Echizen, an ancient pottery center in Fukui prefecture, for hosting the festival, he told Koji Mitamura, executive director of the GPFF-Japan 2007 that "Films are a very effective medium to spread the culture of peace and the message of understanding, harmony, and cooperation. Peace and development are inseparable and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) of the world stand to benefit most from our efforts in building a culture of peace."

Long-time environmental activist Noel Brown, president of the Friends of the United Nations, profoundly understands and promotes the moral dimension of environmental awareness and care. In a 1989 interview posted at In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, he explained his globally interrelated worldview:

"We need a vision that encompasses all human rights to freedom, equality and conditions of life; and an environment that promises life, dignity and well-being. We need also a new legitimacy, a new ethic, and new metaphors.

"Thanks to the vision from space, for the first time we are able to view the planet as an interactive and dynamic whole. We have now become a self-reflecting species, and we sense that we have become a global species. It is only as a global species that we can solve these problems, which is why we must create a new vision and an institution that can help us to deal with these new realities."

Almost twenty years later, Dr. Brown is still working to manifest this new vision, most recently with old and new colleagues at the Global Peace Film Festival Japan, including Nina Streich, director of the Global Peace Film Festival, which is in the works towards expanding to a venue on the Jordan/Israel border, and an American JET-alumnus Hilary Brown, an international event planner, and GPFF volunteer.

Nina Streich, a lifelong peace activist, happened to coordinate media coverage for the 1982 demonstration against the Reagan administration nuclear weapons build-up. This event drew between 750,000 to a million protestors in New York City. Nonviolent Activist's "When a Million Marched Against the Bomb," has fascinating details about the protest march from the UN to Central Park, reputed to be the largest in U.S. history. Around the world, peace organizations commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the march this year. Leslie Kagan, the lead organizer, now national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, had this to say:

"The march from the UN to Central Park was probably the largest single protest in U.S. history, with the police saying it was 750,000 people. New York City was shut down for the day. Today, 25 years later, the world is no safer, no more free of dangers of a nuclear catastrophe. The U.S. government's nuclear hypocrisy has not led to peace, but has fed perpetual conflict. While Washington takes us to war claiming to be searching for weapons of mass destruction, they are now about to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons."

I hope to share more of Nina's insights (last year's interview at this link) about changes in the movement since that time, after her return from Japan.

Last year, I was struck when she told me how the U.S. government derailed the participation of Japanese hibakusha at the 1982 protest by denying them visas. It made me reflect upon the global history of multi-state repression of anti-nuclear voices, and the fact that the anti-nuclear movement receives almost no mainstream media attention. At the same time, the movement continues to expand and grow, and it's not going to die out when the first generation of hibakusha leave this earth.

We already see evidence of a dynamic pan-hibakusha movement being passed down to a growing number of second and already a third generation of hibakusha around the world, as countries continue to nuclear bomb themselves in the form of "tests;" as new radioactive weapons are being used in Iraq; and as more and more nuclear waste accumulates. Ernest Sternglass has documented the global nature and threat of low level radioactive fallout that has blanketed so much of the earth, in SECRET FALLOUT: LOW-LEVEL RADIATION FROM HIROSHIMA TO THREE-MILE ISLAND.

The book demonstrates that it was no exaggeration, and not just a symbolic statement, when Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said, "We are all hibakusha."

On the hopeful side, Ambassador Chowdhury's prediction has also come to pass: "I believe the time of culture of peace has come. It is no longer an idea nor just a concept – it is growing into a global movement."

Both the pro-nuclear and the anti-nuclear movements have taken on international dimensions, and we see intersecting circles of these conflicting movements everywhere, including at this American-originated peace film festival transplanted to Echizen, on the coast of the Japan Sea, about to premiere films about the Dalai Lama's promotion of human values, and underground nightclub eco-activism.

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