Nagasaki Peace Messengers

Len Kado, second from left, helped bring the Nagasaki Peace Messengers to Dunn

At a time when student awareness of global issues and even 20^th Century history appears to be overshadowed by technological diversions and economic predictions, postmortems and blame, a small group of Japanese students, artists and activists volunteered their knowledge, passion and research to one hundred American High Schools. Dunn School, an independent boarding and day school in the Santa Ynez Valley, was the only educational institution to respond to and make welcome a group of ambassadors of peace to visit the campus and remind students of the awful reality of war and their responsibility in securing the world against such horrors in the future.

Dunn’s Head of School, Michael Beck, welcomed the Japanese contingent by reminding the community that the amphitheater upon which the meeting place rests is also on top of the north wall of a bomb shelter built and buried in the early 1960s when this nation seemed likely to be part of a fiery conclusion to a cold war.

Mr. Beck spoke about his career in the military where it was his “mission to protect the peace, not prosecute war.” Those sentiments were what brought the members of the Nagasaki Peace Messengers to Dunn; to bring their message of world peace and elimination of nuclear weapons.

Started in 1996, the Ten Thousand High School Students Signatures Campaign presented 85,306 petitions at the United Nations meeting in Switzerland in 2009. The United Nations ambassador honored the activities of these students by stating, “Your activities have big power and your efforts are growing and will bear fruit. Your visit is one of the big events at the United Nations!”

Film crews from the Nippon Japanese news station, Kyoto News, and the NHK News stations were on hand to film the activities of the Nagasaki Peace Messengers and the Dunn School students.

High School students, Ann-Mi Naruse, Ayako Fukuda, and Eori Yoneda (College Junior) presented some excerpts from their documentary DVD on the survivors of the Nagasaki/Hiroshima atomic bombing in 1945 at an all-school assembly for Dunn students. An exhibit was set up in the conference room with pictures and photographs of their UN visit, and some of devastations resulting from the atomic bomb. They also made a presentation at the Dunn Middle School. Ann-Mi Naruse commented, “The Dunn Students are so enthusiastic, intelligent, and had wonderful questions for us. They signed our petitions and wrote great letters to us on what they learned and how much they support our efforts”.

Presentations of 1,000 origami cranes, dvd’s, books on the world peace movement, and peace flags were made to Head of School, Mike Beck and Faculty Advisor to the Multi-Cultural Club, Len Kado. “We were honored by the Peace Messengers visit,” said Kado, “and Dunn School can be proud of being the only school out of 100 US high schools to host a visit by these students. Our own students learned a lot about the efforts of the Peace Messengers for world peace and elimination of nuclear weapons.”