YOKOHAMA--Folk singers in the 1960s and 1970s called for change, and one of the most renowned in Japan, Tokiko Kato, is still going strong, emerging as the voice of the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World in Yokohama.
YOKOHAMA--Folk singers in the 1960s and 1970s called for change, and one of the most renowned in Japan, Tokiko Kato, is still going strong, emerging as the voice of the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World in Yokohama.
At the two-day conference, which runs through Jan. 15 at the Pacifico Yokohama convention center, the songs came from Kato, known as the "Japanese Joan Baez."
At 68, Kato's voice has been one of Japan's clearest and most continuous on both the cultural and political stage, so it's no surprise she brought members of the audience--many born after the construction of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and young enough to be her grandchildren--to tears as she reprised several of her best-known protest songs from the Vietnam War, ANPO (the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty), and the first anti-nuclear power era.
"It seems unbelievable but there are still people in positions of power who say we must continue going on with nuclear energy," Kato said between numbers on Jan. 14. "Some of them are very people I fought beside. Somewhere along the way we gave up on our vision and settled into the company system."
A graduate of the prestigious University of Tokyo, Kato gained fame as a folk singer before marrying Toshio Fujimoto, one of the main leaders of the student protest movement in the late 1960s. Kato retired briefly to give birth to her first child, but was singing again as the nation embarked on its nuclear reactor-building spree.
Although she sang about Agent Orange and covered John Lennon's "Imagine," Kato kept her first 40-minute program to songs written for her first daughter, born in 1973, and left out the song most closely identified with her anti-nuclear activities--"Nuclear Gypsy"--a description frequently applied to herself.
"I don't call myself one, but people do because it seems I've turned up at almost every anti-nuclear energy demonstration over the decades," she explains. "In actuality it refers to those migrant workers who move from nuclear plant to plant to do the dirty work as a reactor is taken offline for maintenance. Thinking of the conditions they're facing now in Fukushima, I couldn't bring myself to sing it."
Instead, Kato offered a different description of herself and the changing times.
"Although I've tried to do a lot during the past year," she says, touring and performing through disaster-struck areas, "things aren't going in the way they should.
"I've come to think of myself as one of the musicians on the S.S. Titanic sailing to its fate. As much as possible, I want to keep playing for the passengers as they scramble for what safety they can find."