We’re Getting Ready for #HiroshimaNagasaki75!

This is one way the Vermont Branch is using the peace cranes from Japanese Hibakusha that have been sent to WILPF branches. Photo by Robin Lloyd, with permission.

By Robin Lloyd and Ellen Thomas
Co-chairs, Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

July 2020

We hear that WILPF US Branches have received the boxes of peace cranes that Japanese Hibakusha reverently sent to national WILPF and Jan Corderman kindly forwarded to each branch. We hope that branch members are figuring out how to thread and display and distribute them in ways that will speak to the hearts of those who receive them.

The Solidarity Event planning team will provide you many different peace crane ideas.  

Pictured above is one way the Vermont Branch is using the cranes. Vermont WILPF has also created a card you can print and cut into four. Robin Lloyd attached the cards to a clothes line on a tree in her yard, with tiny cranes hanging down on a thread. The card reads, 

Please take this peace crane & card and pass it on. This year is the 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945. Hibakushas – survivors of the bombing – and friends have folded thousands of cranes and sent them to peace groups in America to remind us of the fragility of life and beauty and to share in a commitment to abolish nuclear weapons. Try folding your own paper cranes.

There is also a printable one-page graphic showing how to fold a crane, which was sent to the Branches along with the box of cranes, and is available for everybody on the last page of Resources for 75th Anniversary commemorations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, listed at the bottom of the Disarm/End Wars web page.

Be Sure to Put These July 13 & August 9 Zoom Events on Your Calendar!

On July 13 at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT - Tina Cordova, a founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, and Joni Arends, Director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, will share their struggles to get compensation and health care for victims of the July 16, 1945, Trinity A-bomb test near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Joni will also discuss the radioactive waste disposal problems faced by New Mexicans. 

On August 9 at 6 pm ET - Dr. Hideko Tamura Snider, author of One Sunny Day and founder of One Sunny Day Initiatives, will speak of her childhood experience of the Hiroshima bombing and life before and after.

By the time you receive this eNews, Phyllis Bennis and Blanche Wiesen Cook will have described the founding of the United Nations and WILPF’s uphill battle to democratize it in the June 28 webinar. After each webinar we are putting a link to its recording on the date, from the Disarm/End Wars web page or on the 75th Anniversary Timeline.

These events are among those being strategized by Cherrill Spencer and the 2020 WILPF US Solidarity Event Planning Team.