Peace Tree from Hiroshima
A Little Bonsai with a Big Story
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
**Winner of the 2015 Gelett Burgess Award for Best Intercultural Book**
**Winner of the 2015 Silver Evergreen Medal for World Peace**
This true children's story is told by a little bonsai tree, called Miyajima, that lived with the same family in the Japanese city of Hiroshima for more than 300 years before being donated to the National Arboretum in Washington DC in 1976 as a gesture of friendship between America and Japan to celebrate the American Bicentennial.
From the Book:
"In 1625, when Japan was a land of samurai and castles, I was a tiny pine seedling. A man called Itaro Yamaki picked me from the forest where I grew and took me home with him. For more than three hundred years, generations of the Yamaki family trimmed and pruned me into a beautiful bonsai tree. In 1945, our household survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1976, I was donated to the National Arboretum in Washington D.C., where I still live today—the oldest and perhaps the wisest tree in the bonsai museum."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time author Moore draws from the story of a centuries-old bonsai tree that was donated to the United States for the 1976 bicentennial. The miniature white pine, she explains, became known as the Peace Tree, "because it is a symbol of friendship between Japan and America." The tree narrates its journey, beginning with its birth in an island forest "nearly four hundred years ago" where it is collected and subsequently tended to by a man named Otaro. An elderly Otaro gives the bonsai to his son, who passes it to his son, and so on. "In 1945, something terrible happened," the tree says as Wilds (All About Japan) shows a tiny airplane on an page streaked with dark purples and grays; the next pages show a vast expanse of beige rubble, the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. The tree and its caretaker survived, and Moore goes on to trace the bonsai's path to the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Closing notes separate fact from fiction and discuss the art of bonsai in this straightforward but affecting tribute to patience, dedication, and a generosity of spirit that surmounted tragedy. Ages 8 up.
