Midsemester Break
While visiting Japan last week during our mid-semester break, I could not but help think of the IB Mission Statement line "The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.”
Throughout the week, I appreciated seeing and experiencing a culture vastly different from that in which I grew up and in which I now live and work.
Our visit included meeting up with friends, checking off some of the must do items in Tokyo (visiting Asakusa Temple, seeing Shibuya Crosswalk) and Kyoto (visiting Fushimi Inari-taisha temple amongst others, and sampling amazing food) as well as - of course - taking the Shinkansen train and shopping!
Thursday October 18, however, was a more sobering day. We learned, while visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum Memorial, more about the immediate and long term effects on those who were in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 as well as the Mayors of Peace group, which “...aims to build solidarity and facilitate coordination among the cities that support the Programme to Promote the Solidarity of Cities toward the Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons.”
I am mindful of George Santayana’s quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” when reflecting on what we saw and learned. The experience of being in the place where the first atomic bomb was dropped, seeing artefacts, and watching the moving video testimony of hibakushas (which literally translates as "explosion-affected people" and refers to those who were exposed to radiation following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was emotional. During the day, the pain and suffering was palpable; as is the steely determination “... to help create a better and more peaceful world …”
Having heard and read many times the story of Sadako Sasaki, perhaps the most famous hibakusha, I was struck seeing some of the incredibly small cranes she had folded on display.
Besides symbolic events like International Day of Peace, how do you - especially in these challenging times - incorporate activities enabling students to internalize and/or create opportunities upon which they may act so as to “... help create a better and more peaceful world …”?
REFERENCES:
Coerr, E. (1999) Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes