Demo

The president of the United States of America, George W. Bush, visited Kyoto November the 15th and the 16th. As the first guest ever he stayed in the Imperial Court Guesthouse.
In advance of this visit, the surroundings of the Imperial Palace have been stacked with policemen in order to prevent a possible terrorist attack. In their risk calculations they put highest priority on foreigners. So when I was biking towards class I was stopped by a policemen under the guise that he wanted to check whether or not my bike was stolen and therefore he had to call another policemen to tell him the number of my bike.
At that time I just accepted it as one of the strange things that can happen to you, but now I realise it was out of possible terrorist attack considerations. At the university campus a very big cardboard, announcing that there was going to be a demonstration against Bush, greeted me at the front gate. Being always in a hurry to be on time in class, I never really read what it was saying. But one of my friends did read it and he told us that on Tuesday there was going to be a demonstration. 7 people including me were interested in going and to have a look what Japanese demonstrations were like. We would meet each other at the campus at 7 o’clock and than join the campus. At 7 o’clock we were there, but no one else. We figured out that my friend also did not look that well on the cardboard and that we had to go to a different place. So we hiked downtown and there we heard and later also saw the demonstrators and we joined them for the last 200 meters of the demonstration, which was crossing the street and ascending some chairs to end at a road for pedestrians, which runs next to the main river of Kyoto, the Kamogawa. There I got the chance to have a better look at my fellow demonstrators and to my surprise I saw lots of elder women and men but almost no students while the demonstration was organized by students of Kyoto University. Moreover most of them were wearing both sunglasses as a head and some even had a scarf in front of their mouth so that they were unrecognisable. When we asked why they demonstrated in this outfit they pointed at the people of the bridge, who were also wearing the same kind of outfit, and explained that they were the police, who were taking pictures of the demonstrators. These pictures would be distributed among the major Japanese companies and the demonstrators could not get a job. This also explained at least partly the very few demonstrators, people that might be interested in going refrained from it out of fear of the consequences. Another reason was that apparently young Japanese did not have a real interest in politics, they don’t really care by whom they are ruled.
I was shocked by this curtailing of the democratic right of demonstrating and freedom of expression. It limits the way in which people can express an opinion that differs from the opinion of the government. And it feels like it is a small step from a government that limits your freedom of expression to a government that subscribes what you should think. So I decided to go to the second demonstrating on Wednesday, this time also wearing a hat and a scarf. Again some 80 people gathered and under the escort of 700 policemen we went on our march around the Imperial Palace. I am afraid that Bush did not even hear us, but I think it is a good thing to raise your voice in an environment were they try to stop you from expressing your opinion.