Promoting Peace through boats and bells

This year the New Zealand World Peace Bell has welcomed two Japanese people associated with the Peace Boat. A household name to Japanese, the Peace Boat has been operating since 1983. Calling it a boat, however, is an understatement. Ocean Dream, built in Denmark in 1981, weighs in at about 36,000 tonnes.  Over 30 years it has carried 50,000 passengers of different ages and nationalities. Rather than being on vocation, passengers participate in peace-related projects. A recent voyage that called into Port Lyttelton was carrying a banner asking governments to support the 2017 UN resolution to have nuclear weapons declared illegal. In the cargo hold was a Japanese lantern destined for the Kurashiki Sister City Garden in Halswell Quarry.

I first heard about the Peace Boat in an obscure way. My partner and I were cycling the length of Japan, heading towards Nagasaki. Some weeks previously, I had signed an agreement with Tomijiro Yoshida, CEO of the World Peace Bell Association in Tokyo, to have a bell gifted to New Zealand. I had discovered the story of Chiyoji Nakawawa fashioning a large bell, similar to a Japanese temple bell, using coins from countries belonging to the newly-established United Nations. The bell was presented to the UN in 1954 with Nakawawa’s message.  ``What happened to my country in 1945 (referring to the A bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) should not happen to any other.’’

While bicycle wheels rolled along Japan, the bell for New Zealand was manufactured. One of our core group members had contacted the Peace Boat having heard it was setting off on its first voyage to New Zealand, calling at Auckland. It was agreed the Peace Boat would carry our bell to Auckland at no charge to us. A postman delivered the 385 kg bell to Christchurch.  Rather than riding a typical postal bicycle, he was driving a large truck. 

A stylish pavilion was built for the bell and it was unveiled in Christchurch Botanic Gardens on October 3, 2006.

Asuka Watarai, from Chiba Prefecture, had sailed on the Peace Boat from Yokohama to New Zealand and Australia and beck to Japan earlier this year. She returned to New Zealand and was a guest of one of our WPB members, Antonio Yuge, while in Christchurch.

She enjoyed her visit to our World Peace Bell, the occasion being enhanced by the Botanic Gardens displaying brilliant autumn colours. Asuka looked as if she was trying to hug the bell.  (She would have been welcome to give me a hug. Sadly that did not happen.)

Earlier in the year 82-year-old Michimasa Hirata disembarked the Peace Boat in Port Lyttelton and visited our bell. He had a poignant message, having been aged nine when the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He told about aimless people with skin shredding and eyes popped from their sockets. He spoke also about a network of World Peace Bells worldwide promoting a world without war.

The most recent World Peace Bell unveiling was in Canberra, Australia, It was the 24^th bell internationally.

By co-incidence, I am penning this blog on ANZAC Day when Australia and New Zealand, especially, are commemoration their thousands of casualties in two world wars.

Maybe the most appropriate way to honour one’s war dead is to never start another conflict.