(Clearwisdom.net)

Dear Honorable Minister Kawaguchi:

We are Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) practitioners in Washington DC and Mid-Atlantic States. We respectfully request that the Japanese Government help in rescuing Ms.Yoko Kaneko from her dire life-threatening condition by the illegal arrest by the Chinese authority. We sincerely hope you will bring up this issue and urge the Chinese authorities to release Ms. Kaneko during your trip to China in next few days.

Falun Gong is a peaceful cultivation practice of "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance" with meditative exercises, which was first introduced to the public in China in 1992. Because of its benefits of giving people better health, higher morality, and peaceful mind, more than a hundred million people in over 60 countries have become Falun Gong practitioners regardless of race, age, gender, and social status. To date, Falun Gong has received close to a thousand awards/proclamations from different countries, including Japan.

In July 1999, the Chinese president Jiang Zemin and his regime banned Falun Gong and launched a vicious campaign to eliminate Falun Gong. He has ordered various governmental branches, such as the state-owned media, to falsify and slander Falun Gong in order to deceive the general public and justify his brutal crackdown. Moreover, his regime has taken away every single avenue for the innocent practitioners to appeal in China; they have no other ways but go on the streets to tell the people about the injustice of the persecution and the truth of Falun Gong. In the past three years, hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained, tortured, and illegally sentenced. There have been at least 467 confirmed deaths resulting from inhumane torture under police custody. It is worth noting that Falun Gong practitioners have been amazingly peaceful; not a single act of retaliation has been reported.

Ms. Kaneko is one of the many Falun Gong practitioners being abused. Chinese authorities in Beijing illegally arrested her for her passing out flyers of the "truth of Falun Gong" on Beijing streets in May this year. She was illegally sentenced to one and half years in a "Labor (Re-education) Camp" without trial in late June. Since her arrest, she has suffered the inhumane treatment and torturing. Her husband, Mr. Atsushi Kaneko (a 46-year-old Japanese businessman), obtained permission to visit her two weeks ago. He said after the visit that: "Yoko's mental condition is very bad; she is completely like another person; she is no more her former self; her mind seems confused, her physical body is very week; she had lost around 10 lbs; there were big bruise marks on her elbows." Also, few days ago, during Yoko's sister's visit, Yoko suddenly fainted and her blood pressure had raised to 220. We are all very worried about her situation.

Falun Gong issues are no longer just problems involving Chinese in China. The persecution itself is an open attack to the basic human rights and humanity. Many governments and international organizations have urged publicly "To stop Jiang Zemin's state-run terrorism, and inhumane, illegal atrocities toward Falun Gong practitioners." Through international intervention and rescue efforts, several Falun Gong practitioners jailed in China have been released, such as Canadian Professor Kunlun Zhang, Ms.Yin Zhu, and Mr. Shenli Lin, Australian artist Ms. Cuiying Zhang, and Irish graduate student Mr. Ming Zhao.

Our Congress has recently passed unanimously House Concurrent Resolution 188 on July 24, 2002 by a vote of 420 to 0. It strongly condemns the persecution of Falun Gong and asks Jiang's regime to cease its persecution. It specifically wants the US Government to use every appropriate public or private forum to urge China to release from detention all Falun Gong practitioners and put an end to the practices of torture and other cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment against the practitioners.

We sincerely hope that Ms. Yoko Kaneko can regain the freedom and return to her home in Japan by your support and intervention along with many others. This is not only for the cause of freedom to a citizen of a country, but for the greater cause of justice and righteousness for the whole world. We'd like to express our deep appreciation to many Japanese organizations and kind-hearted individuals working on Yoko's release. We'd also like to thank you in advance for your attention and efforts. We all wish your trip to China a fruitful and enjoyable one.

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Sincerely yours,

Washington DC Falun Dafa Association