By Tsering Tsomo
MIYAJIMA, Japan, November 3 – A democracy activist in Japan said yesterday that China might undergo a change in the next 10 years.
“I think China will undergo some change in the next 10 years and I am hopeful of Tibet becoming free”, Mr. Makino Seishu, chairman and founder of Democracy in Asia and China (DEMOAC) which has its secretariat in Tokyo said in an interview with exile Tibetan media on the sidelines of the just concluded Hiroshima International Peace Summit.
Mr. Seishu said he founded DEMOAC to promote human rights and democratic principles in Asia and to bring democratic change in China. He said the inspiration behind DEMOAC’s establishment was the Dalai Lama and his non-violent and peaceful struggle for the freedom of the Tibetan people. DEMOAC has offices in Japan as well as Europe including Poland.
“My father and I first learned about Tibet when we read about the Dalai Lama’s meeting with the then Chinese leader Mao Tsetung in Peking 46 years ago. We were troubled by the way the Chinese bullied the young Dalai Lama,” he said.
Mr. Seishu is also a founding member of Tibet Support Group-KIKU. He will lead a delegation to Dharamsala, the exile home of the Dalai Lama in India in mid-November to know more about the exile Tibetan community and to explore ways through which Japan could provide concrete support to the exile Tibetan administration.
The Tibet Support Group-KIKU was founded in 1995 to mobilize support for the Tibetan freedom movement and to put pressure on the Japanese government in engaging China so that the Tibet issue could be resolved through non-violent means, he said.
