After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945 it was thought that nothing would grow in the city for at least seventy five years. However, to everyone's surprise - and delight - the following spring new shoots were seen springing up amongst the debris of the city. Those new shoots provided a powerful message to the survivors of the atomic bomb and gave them hope that they could rebuild their city.
Today, over six decades after the A-bomb, Hiroshima is a green and vibrant modern city. Many of the trees that were planted in the city after the war were gifts from overseas donors and donors from other parts of Japan.
However, 170 of the trees that can still be seen in the city today had actually been in the suburbs of Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped. Amazingly, they survived the atomic bombing and the complete destruction of the city at the end of World War Two.
After the war, many of those trees were replanted or preserved in 55 locations within a 2km radius of the hypocenter. Today, they are officially registered as A-bombed trees. Each A-bombed tree is called a "hibakujumoku" - "survivor tree" and is identified by a name plate.
Green Legacy Hiroshima
In 2011 Nassrine Azimi, senior adviser at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in Hiroshima (UNITAR), together with ANT-Hiroshima (a Hiroshima based Non Profit Organization), and a group of friends, launched an initiative called Green Legacy Hiroshima through the auspices of UNITAR to help spread the seeds of Hiroshima's A-bomb-surviving trees around the world as a contribution to worldwide peace and understanding.
The founding idea of Green Legacy Hiroshima is to distribute seeds and saplings from Hiroshima's A-bombed trees to interested groups and schools around the world. Nassrine Azimi and ANT-Hiroshima's hope that the seeds will be planted in urban, botanical gardens, schools, public and private institutions and places of political or symbolic importance for the message of peace.
Already, their hope is being realized. Over the last twelve months, seeds from Jujube, Fern palm, Hackberry, Ginkgo, Camphor, Kurogane holly, Muku and Bead trees have been collected and distributed to botanical gardens and schools in Russia, Holland, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, South Africa and Afghanistan.
In some cases, the seeds have been planted as part of a "Japanese garden," as is the case in Irkutsk Botanical Garden in Russia.
Green Legacy Hiroshima has also planted "second generation" a-bomb survivor trees in Hiroshima, such as the second generation Persimmon tree which the group recently planted on Peace Boulevard, which runs along an east-west axis across the centre of the city.
The beauty of the Green Legacy Hiroshima initiative is that it is a relatively low budget initiative which has a positive impact both on the environment and on the hearts and minds of everybody who will visit the botanical gardens and school gardens to look at "peace seeds from trees that survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima".
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Please check the UNITAR Green Legacy Hiroshima webpage if you would like to participate in a project to plant seeds of peace: http://www.unitar.org/hiroshima/greenlegacy
Find out more about the work of ANT-Hiroshima, a peace education NPO based in Hiroshima, at: http://www.ant-hiroshima.org/en/
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