Hiroshima Peace Garden

Planting Peace

One tiny seed and one very small lady bring life to the Gresham Japanese Garden in the form of a Peace tree. As noted in the December 2021 Tsuru Soars, through the City of Gresham, the Garden received a ginkgo biloba seedling, one of over 50 now planted throughout Oregon. Jim Buck, who cared for the sapling until it was large enough to plant since he got it about a year ago, it is healthy, though hasn’t grown much, probably because it is still in a pot.
The Peace Tree project originated with the One Sunny Day Initiative, started by Hideko Tamura Snider, who was a 10-year-old living in Hiroshima when the United State dropped the nuclear bomb on that city in 1945. Amazingly, despite 140,000 people dying, she survived, as did a few ginkgo and persimmon trees within the blast zone. As a survivor, she is called a hibakusha. The trees are called “survivor trees,” hibakujumoku. A number of years ago, seeds were collected from the survivor trees and have now been sent around the world and grown as Peace Trees.

Hideko moved to the US, went to college, married an American, worked as a psychiatric social worker, received an honorary doctorate, and now lives in Medford, Oregon. She speaks all over the world on behalf of peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons. The mission of the One Sunny Day Initiative is to plant seeds of universal peace, hope, and reconciliation.

The tree’s new home, called the Peace Garden, across from Ambleside Annex at the south end of Main City Park, will be officially dedicated on September 19, from 10 to 11am. David Hedburg, a filmmaker who captured the transfer of the tree to Jim Buck from Jim Gersbach of the Oregon Department of Forestry and has documented many of the Peace Tree installations around Oregon, will film the ceremony. This event is open to the public, and everyone is welcome to attend.

Preparing the site has required about 93 hours of volunteer time, according to Jim Buck. The task was difficult because the area had to be cleared of salal and Oregon grape plants with dense roots. The plants were carefully dug up so they could be transplanted into other parts of the garden. A stone path leads to the tree’s new home.

At the base of the tree, visitors will find a plaque from Ms. Tamura Snider, who serves as a Peace Ambassador to the City of Hiroshima. The plaque will include QR codes so that visitors can use their cell phones to get more information about One Sunny Day’s various educational initiatives. Hideko Tamura Snider has written a children’s picture book about creating peace in the world called When a Peace Tree Blooms, a “story of affirmation for human resilience and a choice toward enduring peace through reconciliation,” according to the One Sunny Day Initiative’s website.

A second plaque will identify the groups that worked together to bring the Peace Tree to GJG. They are: Urban Forestry Sub Committee, Gresham Butte Neighborhood Assoc., City of Gresham, and Gresham Japanese Garden.
Steve Stevens has donated the landscaping plan for the area, incorporating plants aligned with Japanese landscape design, including shrubs, grasses, currant, and heather, plant materials that provide color during all seasons.
Jim says, “within the plant kingdom, there are five divisions with over 300,000 species of seed-bearing plants. The ginkgo is one division and it’s the only species in its division, because of its uniqueness. It’s the oldest living plant specimen, from the time of the dinosaurs. It takes about 15 years for it to mature, and until then, we won’t know if it’s male or female! If it produces fruit, it’s female. If it only produces pollen, it’s male.” Read December 2021’s first Peace Tree newsletter article: https://www.greshamjapanesegarden.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Tsuru_Soars_dec-online.pdf.
Oregon has one of the largest collections of Hiroshima peace trees of any state or nation outside Japan. You can visit others throughout the state. The location list is at: https://www.oregon.gov/odf/forestbenefits/Pages/hiroshima-peace-trees.aspx.
Please join us on September 19th at 10am for the dedication.

Green Legacy Hiroshima (GLH) was established in 2011 to safeguard and spread seeds and saplings of Hiroshima’s A-Bombed survivor trees. These seed and saplings have been sent to 130 locations in 40 countries and have taken root and grown into young trees.
In November of 2023, Jim Gersbach from the Oregon Department of Forestry, Mike Oxendine from Oregon Community Trees, and filmmaker David Hedberg visited Hiroshima City and touched the A-bombed mother tree, called Yoji Yamahata.
A documentary film “The Seeds of Peace” is currently being produced by David Hedberg. He sheds light on Hideko Tamura, who was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima when she was 11 years old. She now lives in Ashland, Oregon and is dedicated to planting seeds and saplings of A-bombed trees, in the United States.
GJG and the City of Gresham are honored to care for a Ginkgo biloba second-generation seedling donated through Green Legacy Hiroshima.
Download article by Yomiuri Shimbun translated for print. (https://www.greshamjapanesegarden.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Seeds-of-Peace-Growing-in-the-World-article.pdf)

Hiroshima Peace Garden Dedication

While visiting Gresham in November of 2017, the delegation from Ebetsu joined Mayor Bemis at Main City Park for the announcement of the beginning of Ebetsu Plaza. This event was highlighted by the tree planting event and the presentation of the plaque marking the project. During that presentation, Mayor Bemis and myself announced to those present that we would be providing up dates of the progress of the construction from the beginning to completion. You can find these updates here and on a dedicated Facebook page, The Ebetsu Plaza Project.