Suginami Ward may be known as a bed town, but the residents are restless. Butting up against Musashino and Mitaka cities and sharing a "west wing" location with Setagaya Ward to the south and Nerima Ward to the north, what appears to be a quiet residential area has always been a hotbed of activism.
In 1954, the "Suginami Appeal," a petition started by a few of the ward's housewives to protest nuclear weapons, rustled up 20 million signatures. Recently, residents have sued the government to block school use of a history textbook said to justify Japan's aggressions in World War II, and, so far, the ward refuses to surrender private information on its residents to Tokyo's Juki Net, the intragovernmental electronic registry network set up in 2002. Add to this an ordinance to limit the number of security cameras that can be installed around the ward, and a picture emerges of a feisty populace.
"I'm grateful for the protection of privacy," says 35-year resident Mitsuko Takemura, "but our garbage problem is terrible."
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