Compared with the West, and recently the Middle East, which has been swept by civil uprisings, Japan is not commonly known for having large-scale demonstrations or violent antigovernment protests.
But since March 11, when the Great East Japan Earthquake devastated the Tohoku region and triggered the Fukushima nuclear crisis, the public has found a new cause for standing up and demonstrating on a scale unseen since the student protests of the 1960s.
Sept. 19 saw an unprecedented tens of thousands of people gather in Tokyo to protest nuclear power, surprising even the participants.