Mayor Cecilia Taylor has issued an additional Proclamation Recognizing the 75th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, that designates the week of August 5 through August 12th as "Menlo Park-Bizen Peace week." Bizen, Japan, also a Mayors for Peace City is one of Menlo Park's Sister Cities visited by city "delegations" and exchanges with youth from Bizen, including Menlo Park youth most recently in 2018.
The recent - early August - proclamation from Mayor Taylor urges both cities to commemorate the week with bell ringing ceremonies, "...either individually at home, virtually, or in some safe public area taking care to observe all public health orders and advisories, " reinforcing my efforts in contacting local churches before the anniversaries on Aug. 6 and 9th, to either ring bells or request prayers for peace from their congregations. The invitation was also posted on the website/calendar for Multi-Faith Voices for Peace and Justice that represents peninsula churches, synagogues, mosques and humanists. We are proud of Menlo Park as a Peace City as well as a Tree City for these proclamations.
Residents are encouraged to visit the public art installation of over 1000 paper peace cranes made by volunteers on display through the end of August outside the Art Ventures Gallery, 888 Santa Cruz Ave, on a tall trellis near the gallery entrance, and on an adjacent small flowering "street tree" that displays colorful paper cranes in strands, including 350 small cranes in seven strands sent to the local sponsoring group, the Peninsula/Palo Alto Women's Intl. League for Peace & Freedom
(WILPF) from peace activists in Ehime, Japan.
A short video will be available soon about the installation, and I'm in contact with the Japanese Consulate-General's office in San Francisco, and the Japan Cultural and Information Center to make a gift of some of the cranes made by volunteers as well as strands of cranes given to us by peace activists in Ehime, Japan.
We couldn't have reached our goal of more than 1000 paper cranes (the traditional memorial) without individuals and families in Menlo Park and surrounding cities, and the young women volunteers organized by Jenny Rutherford, representing the Stanford Hills chapter of the National Charity League, who contributed hundreds of cranes, and the encouragement and cooperation of the Menlo Park Public Art non-profit CEO and Art Ventures Galley director Katharina Powers.
Paper peace cranes continue to "fly in" to grace the location with their colorful representation of wishes for a world at peace, without nuclear weapons.
