British children send message of peace with their origami cranes
A NEW generation has delivered a message of peace and reconciliation on the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb strike.
At the National Memorial Arboretum, in Alrewas, Staffordshire yesterday, local children folded origami peace cranes, to remember the day the world woke up to the atomic bomb.
In a quiet area of European and Japanese maple trees, planted to mark the Anglo-Japanese Grove of Reconciliation, youngsters hung cranes from the branches.
At its centre is a stone of reconciliation, presented by the Japanese government, and nearby, the Hiroshima Cairn, topped by a symbolic stone donated by the city, remembering the millions of people who suffered and died in the war.
Holding up an origami crane, nine-year-old William Saunders said: “We are trying to make these – they turn out to be very, very hard to make.
“They’re paper cranes. They represent when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”
He added: “They all get hung together and it represents peace.”
Asked what he had learned in school about Hiroshima, he added: “I know that they were still in war, and then this one day it just drops on them and injured hundreds of people and it was a very sad event.”
Also at the ceremony were sisters Christine Tomkinson and Jenny Carter, whose father was a Japanese prisoner of war (POW).
Sergeant Francis Railey was in the Royal Marines having joined two days after his 18th birthday in 1937 to escape a life working in Hafodyrynys colliery, near Caerphilly, in South Wales.
Mrs Tomkinson, a retired careers officer from Stockport, said: “I think we should be thinking about just generally getting on with each other, allowing people to express their feelings without coming to blows.
“I know that might sound very naive, but that is how I personally feel about it.”