A BRIEF SUMMARY of the JIZOS for PEACE PILGRIMAGE
from  Jan Chozen Bays

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
The first project of Jizos for Peace is now completed. Upon returning from Hiroshima and Nagasaki I felt as if a huge promise made by thousands of people has been kept, and kept well. I wish I could thank every person individually who made even one of the hundreds of thousands of beautiful and peaceful Jizos that we took and gave away in Japan. I am writing a longer account, but I wanted to send out a short message soon to thank you all from the bottom of my being for being such heartily enthusiastic and incredibly creative contributors to the Jizos for Peace exhibit.
Each day of the two week pilgrimage was so packed with events, and each of the 40 pilgrims had their own personal encounters — it would take a book to tell it all. I want to give you a few highlights.

HOW MANY JIZOS WERE MADE?
We and many others had been painting, sewing and folding Jizos for two years. In the last months the pace quickened as Jizos began pouring in from all over the US and the world. We got over 100 large banners. Every day was like Christmas, with envelopes, boxes and people arriving with more and more lovely Jizos to pass around and exclaim over. In the final days we received a large quilt from the wives and children at an Air Force base with the label "Sorry I'm late! Please take me to Japan." At 10 AM the day before we left, a teacher brought prayer flags from Grant High School in Portland, and at 6 PM a local woman pulled up with four quilts of children's panels. Somehow we managed to pack the Jizos in our many extra bags. One very large suitcase was filled just with origami Jizos!
We had been worried about making our goal of 270,000 Jizos (one for each person who died in the first year as a result of the bombing), but once we got to Japan, we were given many more. A woman from Osaka hand painted the Heart Sutra and almost 20,000 delicate Jizos amidst red lotus petals on long white cloth scrolls. The head priest of Joen-ji, a Jizo temple north of Tokyo, brought us boxes of about 50,000 wooden, clay and painted Jizos hand made by the members of his temple. This brought our total to over 400,000 Jizos!

WHAT WAS THE PILGRIMAGE EXPERIENCE LIKE?
As Kaz Tanahashi said after we returned from the pilgrimage, " It was one of the most difficult experiences of my life and one of the most wonderful."
What were the difficult parts? Summer in Japan is VERY hot and humid. Ten minutes after a shower and a change of clothes your body and garments are completely soaked with sweat. As we hastened to the next vending machine and gulped another cold electrolyte drink we remembered this. Sixty years ago the same hot sun beat down upon thousands of severely burned people who begged in vain for water or had only radioactive black rain to drink.
The second challenge was the emotional impact of the exhibits in the Atomic Bomb Museums. You cannot imagine the devastation until you see it. I've been through the exhibit four times, but I began to cry when I heard the music at the first station. You become quieter and quieter as the horror of it all sinks in ---- we humans can talk ourselves into any kind of cruelty. Then it hits you. This is not a thing of the past. Nuclear war could erupt any time. The bombs are one hundred times stronger today. Your heart sinks.
Your heart rises as you read that people predicted that nothing would grow for 75 years after the bombing, but that plants began sprouting immediately. You emerge from the exhibits into a vibrant city filled with green trees and happy children, and you are overwhelmed by how tenacious life is. You read in the newspaper that the Japanese government is trying to wipe any mention of Japan's culpability for the war out of school textbooks, and your heart sinks again. You smile at a group of nervous kids in school uniforms who approach to shyly ask to talk about peace. They laugh as they receive Jizos from a foreigner. You listen incredulously to a woman who survived the bombing in Hiroshima only to return home to Nagasaki and be bombed again. She is happy to receive a Jizo. You offer origami chains at a memorial to thousands of Koreans who were laboring under force and whose deaths went unrecognized for 45 years. You wipe stinging sweat and tears out of your eyes. You have a cold drink. You hold back tears as you offer incense at the grassy mound that contains the remains of ten thousand unknown dead.
You are filled with awe as you join a choir of Westerners, singing a hymn of peace, and merge with a Japanese choir, all our bodies and voices expressing reconciliation. You give away Jizos to sweet old people in wheelchairs in nursing homes who whisper "Thank you" in the English they learned from the occupation army. You shake your head in dismay and disbelief as survivors tell you that no one from American has ever done anything like this in Nagasaki in the 60 years since the war ended and they did not know that Americans cared about peace. You begin a new day with zazen, grateful for the serenity it offers to balance the emotional swings of this adventure.
As we encountered horrifying scenes of devastation in the museums, we remembered the people who actually experienced it. Some of them had lived and were now our hosts. Could we learn from their gentle faces and kind hands how to turn our daily pains and discomforts into outflowing benevolence and hospitality?
The third challenge was traveling with over 35 people. Thank goodness we were all practitioners who consciously took on every difficulty as an opportunity to learn. Many people had not been to Japan, and we traveled Japanese style. We slept together in a few rooms, packed with futons at night. We bathed together in traditional baths, women first one night and men the next. Americans are used to more comfort, more space and more privacy — it's difficult to tiptoe over sleeping snoring bodies at night, to put away your bedding each morning and have no place, not even a bed, to call your own. Again it helped to remember the circumstances that people lived under 60 years ago. As we moved from one city to the next, dragging our heavy suitcases down several flights of stairs and loading them onto yet another bus, we recalled the Japanese interned in the US during the war who were given one or two days to pack up whatever things they could take in two suitcases on a bus. The rest of what they owned was lost.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE JIZOS?
Many people want to know what happened to all the flags, chains of origami and quilts they sent.
Most of them were given away to Japanese people of all ages, from infants in strollers to hip teenagers to elderly hibakusha in wheelchairs in nursing homes. All were received with curiosity and gratitude. On the trolleys in Nagasaki on the way home late at night I gave away Jizos. . After the heat of the day and the emotional impact of the many peace activities, most people were tired and dozing. As I started with the children and did a "Jizo blitz" of the whole trolley, everyone's energy brightened, people murmured thanks and broke out in happy smiles.
We gave thousands of Jizos specifically to survivors. We gave Jizos to our hosts and guides and to the young women who sang part of the Symphony for Nagasaki with us. We tied Jizo quilts around Jizo statues in cemeteries and temple gardens. We gave Jizos away at three formal exhibits of Jizos for Peace in Nagasaki. One was at Kotai-ji, the Soto Zen training temple that kindly hosted our pilgrims. A second was at Kofuku-ji, a Chinese style Obaku Zen temple dating from . The abbots asked us to keep the exhibits up until the end of Obon, saying they had many extra visitors because of the Jizos. The most extensive exhibit was held for two weeks at the small Nagasaki Peace Museum. It included hundreds of Jizos we had never seen before, sent to the museum from all over Japan, including wooden Jizos from a school on a small island and exquisite fabric Jizos from a doll making school, made in Jizos we had never seen before! On August 6th over one thousand people came to see the exhibit, from as far away as Tokyo, the largest crowd they have ever had.
People began to ask if they could borrow some Jizos to hold additional exhibits. In addition, some of the Japanese we met expressed surprise that Americans felt that peace was important and that people all over the world still cared about what had happened there. Thus we decided to pack up the Nagasaki exhibits and send them to a Jizo temple in Fukushima, where a Jizos for Peace display was held on November 24th (Thanksgiving Day in the US). From there they may go to Tokyo, then possibly to Europe and Taiwan. We will keep you posted.
For those whose Jizos were not given away and are now touring, we did not have time to ask your permission. We felt you would be happy to have your Jizos fly around the globe, carrying your prayers for peace and inspiring many more people to do what they can to heal the human world.

WHAT ABOUT A VIDEO RECORD OF THE TRIP?
An incredible amount of footage was taken of the pilgrimage, as we had four videographers who came as volunteers on the trip! They are working on editing it down into a version long enough to give you the flavor of the trip but short enough to watch all the way through. We will let you know as soon as that is available.

MANY, MANY THANKS TO EACH PERSON WHO BELIEVED THAT THIS COULD BE DONE AND WHO CONTRIBUTED TO JIZOS FOR PEACE. THE BENEFIT OF THIS WORK HAS BEEN RELEASED AND WILL BEAR FRUIT, HELPING TO HEAL THE WOUNDS OF WAR, FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

Palms together in gratitude and love,