Hiroshima University Engages Peace Education
by Jane Schreibman
When visitors walk through the entrance gate at Hiroshima Jogakuin University, they are greeted by a Latin phrase cum deo laboramus -- we work with God -- on the outside wall of the auditorium and library. University President Tsugikazu Nishigaki, Ph.D., had that saying in mind when he launched a peace-education program at the school, which has historical ties to the Women’s Division.
The program brings together students and faculty at the university with their counterparts from other Japanese and international colleges and universities to study peace in Hiroshima’s context as the first city to suffer a nuclear attack when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city Aug. 6, 1945.
Mr. Nishigaki said the idea for the program was born when he attended the city’s annual Aug. 6 memorial service for the first time shortly after he came to Hiroshima and the university. He said he was so moved by the service, which is held in the city’s Memorial Peace Park, he wanted to share the experience with others.
Seven Japanese and two Korean colleges, including Korean Shikoku University, a school historically-related to the Women’s Division, were invited to send three or four students each to the Aug. 5-6, 2001, peace-education program. The students visited the peace park and museum, attended lectures on peace, and participated in a demonstration in front of the Atomic Dome -- the skeleton of the one building in Hiroshima’s center left standing after the bombing. Four students and two faculty members from United Methodist-related Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Ashland, Va., joined Hiroshima Jogakuin University students and faculty for a May 23-30 peace seminar in the Japanese city.
Being at the park Aug. 6 and attending the memorial service can help people feel the energy, anger, sorrow and hope of the tens of thousands of people impacted by the bombing, Mr. Nishigaki said. They can better understand events of the past and become a part of developing a vision of peace for the future.
Mr. Nishigaki invited the Randolph-Macon students to Hiroshima after meeting representatives of the college at a November 2000 consultation with colleges and universities sponsored by the Women’s Division. The division organized the consultation as a first step in reconnecting with and strengthening relationships among colleges and universities historically-related to the division. Shikoku University was also represented at the consultation.
A Shikoku student who participated in Hiroshima Joagkuin’s 2000 peace program was invited to visit Korean A-bomb victims at a hospital in Hiroshima. They told her emotionally in Korean of their wartime experiences. In many cases, the Koreans, who had been forcibly brought to Japan as laborers during the war, did not receive treatment for illnesses caused by radiation exposure as did Japanese victims because the Japanese government refused to apply its atomic-bomb relief laws to foreign individuals.
Plans are under way to expand the peace-education program to a year-round program that includes more schools. Mr. Nishigaki wants peace education to become a fundamental program throughout the Hiroshima Jogakuin system of institutions, which ranges from kindergarten through the university level. The junior and senior high schools are located in the center of Hiroshima. A monument commemorating 330 students, two teachers and workers who died in the bomb blast stands next to the high school. High-school students serve as tour guides for Christian high-school students from throughout Japan who visit Hiroshima.
History
Hiroshima Jogakuin was established in 1886 by the Rev. Sadakichi Sunamoto in cooperation with the Methodist Episcopal Church to provide higher education to Japanese women at a time when they did not have access to such education. Jogakuin means school for women.
Ann Elizabeth Gaines, a Methodist missionary from Kentucky who came to Hiroshima in 1887, founded a school for higher education, six kindergartens and many Sunday-school activities. Just before she died in February 1932, the Japanese Ministry of Education approved the school as a college.
In the 1930s, the school’s second president, the Rev. Zensuke Hinohara, bought land on a hill in western Hiroshima and moved the school there. Because the location was beyond reach of the bomb’s devastation, Hiroshima Jogakuin was the city’s first school to resume classes when World War II ended.
Future vision
A shrinking number of young adults in Japan -- down to 1.2 million in 2000 from 2.2 million in 1990 -- means colleges must work to recruit students. Mr. Nishigaki believes focusing on three objectives will attract students: