Now that I'm back in the United States after many years living abroad, I'm finding a lot of things have changed.
One thing I've noticed is that I'm seeing peace poles in public parks. (You know what I'm talking about, right? Those little wooden poles that say "May Peace Prevail on Earth" in multiple languages--see picture here.)
I used to see these peace poles everywhere when I lived in Japan, and I had assumed they were unique to Japan. But now they seem to have spread to America.
So I googled them, and found the Wikipedia entry.
According to Wikipedia, these peace poles did indeed originate in Japan, so I wasn't wrong to associate them with Japan.
Interestingly enough, there's a tie-in with the Japanese Red Army:
The Japanese Red Army's AIA building hostage crisis in Malaysia in 1975 had caused a worldwide impression of the Japanese to deteriorate. Therefore, he wanted to restore the impression of Japan and the Japanese by demonstrating to the world that they sincerely wanted peace, and he came up with the idea of the Peace Pole.[5][6]
[Sidenote: Funny how some of these big news events completely fade out of public memory in a few years, isn't it? The guy was so concerned about Japan's image because of this, and yet how many people today even know about the 1975 AIA building hostage crisis?]
...anyway, back to the Peace Poles.
According to another website, Peace Poles were first introduced to the United States way back in 1986, so I guess they aren't new to the United States. But I feel like they weren't around a lot when I was a kid back in the 80s and 90s. At least not in my town.
Or am I remembering wrong?
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