Tragedy inspires Rochdale-Japan peace project

Eloise Dale (centre) and her ESOL students with their origami cranes, peace tree and peace wall

English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)students at Hopwood Hall College have joined an innovative international peace project with Kobe Ryukoku High School in Japan.

The college’s students, who hail from backgrounds across the world themselves, have been perfecting origami hearts, doves and cranes to send to their Japanese counterparts.

Hopwood Hall’s ESOL students also received personalised messages of peace from the students in Japan, along with accompanying pictures and biographies.

They’re now well underway with writing their own letters in response to their Kobe Ryukoku counterparts.

The idea came from the Peace Crane Project, a global project that invites every child in the world to fold an origami crane, write messages of peace on its wings, then trade their crane with another child somewhere else in the world.

Inspiration for the Peace Crane Project came from the story of Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was two years old when a bomb was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. During ill health, Sadako tried to fold 1,000 origami cranes in the hope that her wish of beating the illness would come true.

Sadly, she died and so her classmates continued to make them as a way to remember her; in turn this later made the act of crane folding a symbol of peace around the world.

On top of making the origami cranes and sending peace letters, the students have now developed pen pal relationships with their Japanese counterparts and regularly write to each other. Many of the messages have been displayed on a ‘peace wall’ and 'peace tree' at the college’s Rochdale campus.

ESOL student support tutor, Eloise Dale, started the project at Hopwood Hall College and described her pride in her students’ contributions. She said: “The students have really enjoyed the project and have now formed a friendship with somebody on the other side of the world. Their letters have talked about what their vision of peace is and there has been some very profound and well thought out ideas about peace, it’s allowed our students to discuss the topic in more detail.

“Although their lives are very different and they are 6,000 miles apart, their hopes and wishes of living in a peaceful world are the same.”