14

The bell in the park

Walking through Volkspark Friedrichshain to the Great Pond, you suddenly find yourself standing in front of a small Japanese temple: a curved pagoda roof supported by red wooden pillars, with a simple bell underneath. You would never guess that it weighs almost four hundred kilograms. If you step closer, you can read the word “Peace” on a banner, in German and Japanese.

Peace bells can now be found all over the world. The first was conceived by Chiyoji Nakagawa, a Japanese man who, in 1942, was the sole survivor of a battle in Burma, alone and unconscious in a bell tower. After the war, he represented his country at the United Nations General Assembly in Paris in 1951. He promised to build a peace bell and asked people from all over the world to donate coins for it. Shipments arrived from 65 countries, and even the Vatican sent gold coins bearing an image of the Virgin Mary and her son. The bell, cast from thousands of coins, was installed at the UN headquarters in New York, and Nakagawa soon founded the World Peace Bell Association, which also gave a bell to Berlin in 1989. Every year on August 6, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it is struck with a long wooden clapper.