I'm waaay behind with this whole blogging thing, so forgive me for posting a week late about what I did on the 30th of June, which is hang up a bunch of paper cranes. (Actually, I didn't do much--as usual, I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, so I did whatever I could see needed doing and then fell back on the convenient role of photographer.)
For the last 20 years, Grass Roots House and Peace Wave have been decorating one of Kochi's shopping arcades with 1 million origami cranes. The cranes are made every year by local elementary school students (and some old ladies). They're strung onto long strings, probably over a meter long, which are then hung on wire circles. Then the circles are tied to large bars in the upper reaches of the shopping arcade. The bars are lowerable using pulleys operated by button-push, and I am pretty sure they were installed just for the yearly crane hanging. The result is really beautiful.
And I think it's successful activism, too! The crane-making brings up peace topics in elementary schools--Mana and I made two recent visits to schools in Aki, in both cases to assemblies in honour of the beginning of the peace festival, and at both of which that school's contribution to the cranes was on display. I'm not sure if all schools do assemblies and the same kind of clear educational efforts as the schools we visited, but I hope so.
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