On Nov. 23, 2024, JoAnn Blatchley, president of the Saint Paul-Nagasaki Sister City Committee, and I visited the Peace Garden in Lyndale Park in Minneapolis. Blatchley is a retired teacher and peace activist. As we entered the Peace Garden, she said, “This is where everything started.” She was talking about her entry into peace activism and what would become her long relationship with the city of Nagasaki.
According to Blatchley, this part of Lyndale Park had been neglected for a long time and had been turned into a rock garden. That changed in the 1980s, when a woman named Marj Wunder joined her husband on a business trip to Japan and visited Hiroshima.
At the time, Wunder was not a peace activist, but a housewife. She took an autograph book with messages of good wishes from her friends to Hiroshima and donated it to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. This was in the midst of the Cold War and the heightened nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Wunder visited Hiroshima again a few years later when she had the opportunity to meet the director of the museum. “We have something for Minneapolis,” the director told her.
Blatchley stopped in front of a zig-zag bridge in the garden and pointed to a stone on the side of the bridge. The stone, found in the ruins of the atomic bombing, was placed in the park in 1985. The following year, a visitor from Nagasaki saw the stone and arranged a gift of another stone, also originally found in the atomic rubble, from Nagasaki, so the Hiroshima stone was placed on one end of the bridge and the Nagasaki stone was placed at the other.
The zigzag bridge (known as yatsuhashi) was originally designed by Jerry Allan, an architect, and Kinji Akagawa, a sculptor, both of whom taught at the Minnesota College of Art and Design. Blatchley noted that the zigzag shape of the bridge was designed to prevent evil spirits from entering the garden as visitors walked into it. The bridge that exists today is the second bridge, because the original bridge became unstable. Blatchley explained to me how various elements of the bridge suggest that it bridges Yin and Yang, as well as East and West. She also noted how beautiful the pond and surrounding areas are in the summer with lilies and other flowers. Several trees have been also planted in memory of individuals involved in the development of the garden.
Blatchley originally became acquainted with Wunder in 1985, when the city of Hiroshima sent three hibakusha to speak in Minnesota. Wunder approached the church where Blatchley is a member and asked them to host a reception for the visitors. Blatchley and her fellow church members hosted a reception for these men.
Every year on August 6, Blatchley attends a commemoration ceremony here in this garden. The commemoration, which involves many people from Saint Paul as well as from Minneapolis, takes place around the Peace Sculpture in the garden. The sculpture, designed by Saint Paul artist Caprice Glaser, is made of Minnesota limestone. The sculpture depicts the steps of folding an origami crane. At the top of the sculpture, a completed origami crane is poised to fly away. The ceremony takes place as people sit on the rocks placed around the sculpture. Each rock has instructions on how to fold an origami crane.
As we walked through the garden together, more people arrived. They were just walking around as family or friends. Blatchley told me that in the mornings you can see people doing yoga. Some weekends, there are weddings.
Blatchley emphasized the transformative quality of the Peace Garden. Wunder’s small act in the early 1980s transformed a neglected, bleak rock garden into a thriving peace garden. Blatchley noted that the experience of entering the garden is also transformative. When visitors park their cars in the parking lot, they do not see the garden. Then, suddenly they see it as they walk past the bushes that separate the parking lot from the garden, and when visitors cross the zigzag bridge designed to keep evil spirits from following them, they experience another kind of transformation. And on a more personal level, the garden represents Wunder’s transformation from a homemaker into a peace activist (She led a local chapter of Grandmothers for Peace and organized a number of significant protests in the year that followed). Likewise, Blatchley was transformed by this garden,Wunder, and other people involved in the project. Blatchley’s long journey as a peace activist and peacemaker began here. For many others who visit the garden on a regular basis, or who happen to be in the garden on a particular day, it can be where everything starts anew.
Photos courtesy of Hirokazu Miyazaki