For junior high school pupils, “two years ago” represents the “distant past”. Way back in 2008, six pupils from Kawabe Junior High School in Ehime prefecture visited Hiroshima to learn about the atomic bomb and the horrors of war.
They visited the Atomic Bomb Dome and attended lectures about the war, peace work and peace education. As part of the programme, they met A-bomb survivors and learned about how precious peace is.
While in Hiroshima, the pupils were given some very special “Aogiri” seeds. They are the seeds of a hardy aogori tree that survived the atom bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.
When they returned to Kawabe Junior High School they planted the seeds. Nothing happened and the pupils had practically forgotten about them when… two years later their seeds began to sprout!!
One of the pupils tells us that, “Watching the seeds sprout and grow has taught the pupils something about peace, the preciousness of life,” according to a report about the peace seeds posted on the school blog.
