Paper Cranes For Peace!

www.120313cranes.org

Last update: May 27, 2009.

Hi! We're Carly and Michelle (and Mocha) and we'd like to announce that due to the generous contributions of paper cranes to this project by so many people that we've reached our goal!! THIS PART OF THE PROJECT IS FINISHED. THANK YOU!!

The Riverside Metropolitan Museum is accepting cranes, one for every Japanese American interned in California.

Please send COUNTED cranes to:
The Riverside Metropolitan Museum
California Peace Crane Project
Attention: Lynn Voorheis
3580 Mission Inn Avenue
Riverside, CA 92501

We well no longer be accepting cranes for this project after June 1st, 2009. Please send your contributions to the Riverside Metropolitan Museum.

05/27/09. We'd like to announce that the Cranes For Peace Memorial has collected over 131,000 cranes. We are so grateful for the many contributions received. It is absolutely amazing how quickly the total exceeded the goal. THANK YOU.

The Riverside Metropolitan Museum, in Riverside, California, has decided to collect cranes for a California Peace Crane Project, one for each of the 93,717 Japanese Americans interned in California. The surplus cranes we have received will be donated to this worthy project.

Please no longer send cranes to our sponsor's address in Eagan, Minnesota. Please instead send any cranes to the address listed at the start of this page. The museum has asked that all packages include a COUNT of the cranes.

05/07/09. We have reached our goal many months ahead of schedule! A big thank you to the Cherry Blossom Alumnae Association in San Francisco for their generous offer of a $500 award for the Cranes for Peace Memorial Project, which was announced at the end of February via email. Before we could even get the information on the web site we had received applications - and thousands of cranes! We will announce the winner of the contest soon. We know we are over the totals we need, but we have not finished counting the cranes yet.

At the end of February, Michelle and her family went to Los Angeles for a week and met the volunteers from JANM and toured the incredible museum. It was a wonderful day spent with our old friends - and new friends. As usual, they had a box of cranes for us to take home with us, too! We also were able to go out to the Riverside, CA Metropolitan Museum and see the Harada House exhibit and the first stages of the exhibit about the Cranes for Peace Memorial Project. The exhibits are great!

We were visited by nine fifth graders from River Crest Elementary School in Hudson, Wisconsin on April 29th. They brought over 1300 cranes with them and a photo of their school mascot - a giant origami paper crane that will hang in their school! They wanted to deliver the cranes and see what 120,000 cranes looked like. They were amazed at the boxes of cranes in the spare room of Michelle's house. We thoroughly enjoyed meeting them and being infected by their enthusiasm for this project.

This project has been a huge part of our lives for nearly a year and we have met so many wonderful people along the way. Each of you has found a place in our hearts and it has been an honor to work with you and learn more about the Japanese American culture and the internment. We hope we have in some way helped the Japanese American people find closure with this experience as well as educate others who did not know about this time in our American history.

We had expected this project to go on for a few more years! These past few months have been filled with distractions relating to stresses with the economy and the website has taken a backseat. We were taken by surprise at the swift end to the project!

You may be wondering why the totals are 120,313 PLUS 11,212. Initially, Topaz was instrumental in helping us with our original DVD as well as launching the crane project. If Steve Koga from Topaz had not sent the DVD to JANM, they would not have invited us to the conference and the project may never have taken off. So we had always planned to give them 11,212 for their new museum. That is the number of internees at Topaz. The 120,313 were meant to be kept together and we are looking for a home for them. Topaz gets first choice for them, though, and we are waiting to find out if they want them.

The project is officially closed, so please do not send any additional cranes. If you have any questions, please contact us at the email address listed at the bottom of this page. We will continue to update this website. Now that the counting can stop, there will be time to present the wonderful material received during the course of the project.

Thank you all so much! We would still love to hear from you, so please feel free to email.

During 2006 and 2007, we worked together on a video documentary project for National History Day. Our subject was the art school at Topaz Relocation Center. After eight months of researching Japanese American internment camps, we came to love the quiet strength and serenity of the internees. We were sad to discover that most of our classmates and many adults had no idea about the internment camps in America during World War II!

There is a famous quote by Yehuda Bauer:

Thou shall not be a perpetrator;
thou shall not be a victim;
and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.

Now is our chance to no longer be bystanders.

We've chosen to make a memorial to the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. This project may take many years to complete, but our hope is that it will create an awareness of how we must create peace and tolerance in our world. This will only happen if, as individuals, we take the time to understand people who are different from us.

Would you like to learn to make a crane? Well, here's help!
We've also created a video, starring Michelle, which shows how to fold an origami paper crane.

We'd like to publish your story related to the internment on our web site to help raise awareness of the impact the internment had, and continues to have, on this nation's citizens. You can reach us via email using the address listed at the bottom of this page.

SGI, our first corporate sponsor. Thank you, SGI, for volunteering to receive our mail and delivering the thousands upon thousands of cranes.

02/02/2009. Just a quick update with a new total, 70749. And, special thanks to a special individual contributor, Bill Shishima, who has contributed 12767 cranes. That is OVER 10% of the total cranes needed for this project, and over 18% of the cranes contributed to date. AMAZING! Thank you, Mr. Shishima.

01/24/2009. Happy New Year! We started out the new year exactly HALF WAY TO OUR GOAL! Hurray! Since then, we have gotten word that nearly ten thousand more cranes are coming. Thank you to JANM for their tireless efforts on behalf of this project and also to the Pine City, MN High School Freshman English Classes for their crane contest. Five English classes made nearly 4500 cranes. The winner of the contest was Hour 5 with 1417 cranes. WOW! We are pleased to announce that the crane project will be part of a special exhibit at the Riverside, CA, Metropolitan Museum. The Harada Exhibit will be open from February through August of this year. There is also a new video on the web site. Michelle and Carly did a short video about why they are doing this project. Have a look! And, thank you all for your support!

12/07/2008. A milestone, of sorts, has been reached. OVER 52000 CRANES! Thank you to everyone who has contributed, whether it was one or thousands.

11/15/08. The JACL Twin Cities Chapter invited Michelle and Carly to be their guests at the 62nd Annual Chrysanthemum Banquet. There was a wonderful presentation by Tom Ideka, the Executive Director of Densho. At the end of the evening, the girls were presented with 2678 cranes!

11/12/2008. Michelle and Carly were on KARE-11 TV news! It was a great piece presented by Jeff Olson. Earlier in the month, Jeff and a camera man from KARE-11 came to interview and film the girls. They were both very interested in the project and made the girls feel at ease with the filming and interview. Here are some photos taken during the interview.

11/10/2008. On October 24th the Willmar Area Learning Center High School sent a delegation of five students and their teacher, Monica Villars, to deliver 1250 origami cranes that they had made over two weeks in September. They arrived at Eagan High School, at 11AM, after a two-and-a half hour drive. Michelle and Carly were called out of their classes and the high school principal, Polly Reikowski, was on hand to greet the group. We were so thrilled to meet them -- and they looked positively incredible walking in with strand upon strand of cranes hung on wooden rods! Photos

11/02/2008. Please vote on Tuesday, November 4th.

Distractions, distractions. I've been negligent in providing an update to the site. But, it's on the way. The crane total and contributors page have been updated. Finally. Expect some more galleries later in the week. --Webmaster

10/26/2008. It's been an incredible three weeks. Thousands and thousands of cranes have arrived in the mail. We're STILL counting. Our preliminary estimate is that our crane total has reached almost 25,000! The rest of the web site will be updated in the next few days.

We've also added a link to Alice Hirai's story presented by 1000 Voices. Please be sure to give it a look.

10/07/2008. We'd like to congratulate the fourth grade students of Rawlings Elementary in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and their teachers Jessica Richardson and Emily Stephens, for successfully making 35 paper cranes. One of the parents, Pam Ohno, presented our NHD video to the class and taught the students how to make cranes. Thank you for taking the time to learn a little about how the decisions of our government affected the lives of over 120,000 Japanese American citizens. We look forward to receiving your cranes and adding them to the memorial. Thank you. A link has been added to the "press" section to a copy of an article appearing in the Ponte Vedra Recorder about these students!

We'd also like to thank Mr. Yosh Ito of the AITOH Company for the generous donation of roughly 7000 potential paper cranes. The gift of origami paper is very much appreciated.

9/28/2008. It was a busy week. Several thousand cranes were received in the mail, bumping our total crane count to over 8200. THANK YOU! A link to photos taken during the 2008 JANM conference has been added, as well as links to two articles which have been published about this project. And finally, recognition to those of you who have contributed your kind words and cranes to this project.

9/23/2008. We've been asked several times about the size of the cranes which can be contributed to the project. While we'd prefer that you start with a 6 inch square of origami paper, we'll gladly accept cranes made from larger or smaller paper. We are thankful for your contribution, no matter how large or small.

Send your stories of internment, questions, or comments to: cranes at 120313cranes dot org.

Problem with this site? Send mail to: webmaster at 120313cranes dot org.

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