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Junior Writers Reporting

Group recycles paper cranes into postcards and business cards

A non-profit organization, “Orizuru Hiroshima” (“Paper Cranes Hiroshima”), based in Minami Ward, Hiroshima, is involved in recycling the paper cranes given to Peace Memorial Park and other locations and turning the paper into such products as postcards and business cards.

The paper cranes come from the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound in Peace Memorial Park and the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital and Atomic-Bomb Survivors Hospital. The organization has established three workshops in Hiroshima Prefecture where people who are disabled help produce the recycled postcards. The postcards are made by hand, using a combination of paper cranes and milk cartons--40% paper cranes and 60% milk cartons. The completed postcards are white with colorful bits from the paper cranes. The finishing touch is a small paper crane attached to each postcard.

In 2000, when the Hiroshima city government called for ideas to make use of the many paper cranes that are offered to Peace Memorial Park each year, Kazue Funada, 61, the leader of Orizuru Hiroshima, proposed that the cranes be made into recycled paper. Although her suggestion was not adopted by the city, Ms. Funada pursed the idea on her own, founding the organization the following year. Ms. Funada, too, is disabled: she lost the sight in her left eye as a result of a traffic accident when she was 20 years old. Because she believes that even the disabled have a duty to pay their fair share of taxes, she decided to establish the workshops to help support their independence.

Ms. Funada hopes that “reborn as postcards and business cards, the paper cranes will continue to carry Hiroshima’s wish for peace out into the world.” (Kana Kumagai, 17, and Reiko Takaya, 14)

(Originally published on March 26, 2012)

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