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Port of Call |
LAST UPDATE September 17, 2005
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| site design imagesparkle.com |
| July 30, 2005 |
Puntarenas, Costa Rica – Peace Boat Press Conference |
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| The landscape of Costa Rica. |
Mr. Yoshioka Tatsuya, the director and founder of the Peace Boat organization, held a press conference in Costa Rica together with Costa Rican peace activist and law student Mr. Roberto Zamora, Arab-American multicultural educator Ms. Debbie Almontaser, and Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Ms. Fumiko Amano. This dynamic group, guest educators on the Peace Boat from New York to Costa Rica, called for the abolition of war and the protection of Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution. Mr. Yoshioka called for the people of Costa Rica to act in solidarity with Japan in promoting international support and understanding for the philosophy and maintenance of Japan’s Peace Constitution, namely Article 9 which renounces war and a military. |
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| From left: Yoshioka, Zamora and Almontaser at the press conference. |
Mr. Roberto Zamora, a Costa Rican citizen, has challenged his government with a lawsuit when Costa Rica joined the “coalition of the willing” for US President Bush’s war on Iraq. Mr. Zamora won his case and the government was forced to demand the United States to remove Costa Rica’s name from the list of war supporters. Mr. Zamora and Mr. Yoshioka are working in solidarity to promote the sustainability of Japan’s Article 9, which is similar to the Costa Rican Constitution’s Article 12; both renounce the country’s right to maintain armed forces. |
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| Ms. Amano, Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor. |
The highlight of the conference was Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Ms. Fumiko Amano’s personal account of her experience since the atomic bomb was dropped on 60 years ago on August 6, 1945. Ms. Amano brought the room to tears with her strong message of peace. Her message urged Japanese people and the world to understand the horrors of war and to protect the Costa Rican and Japanese peace constitutions. “I feel the responsibility to tell people what I lived, but it seems that people just don’t understand what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s just like Iraq, more war and more deaths.” |
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| The presenters ask for international support for Japan’s Article 9. |
The conference ended with unforgettable words from activist Ms. Debbie Almontaser, who has been working since 9/11 to end discrimination and increase multicultural understanding towards Arab, Muslim and South Asian-Americans in the United States. Ms. Almontaser closed the conference with by stating that her “hope is that all the people of Costa Rica would join Peace Boat and Japan to stand in solidarity and to be models for the world to join and understand that peace is the only way that we can exist”. |
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