Mr. Ikuya Kuramoto, a teacher at Tohoku Seikatsu Bunka College High School (Former Mishima Gakuen Girls High School), applied for the project after seeing the works of Kaki-an at Echigo- tsumari Art Triennial and that was how the tree planting was realized. That year also commemorated 100th anniversary of Mishima Gakuen. So the persimmon tree planting ceremony was conducted as part of the commemorative events.
The tree planting ceremony was a large-scale event, with almost 850 participants including the students from the school, related parties and neighbors, and the students buried the “Persimmon Tree Bottle” containing about 1,100 messages addressed to themselves 10 years from now. Another persimmon tree was also planted at Niji-no-Oka Community Center, located in the city.
Unfortunately, the tree planted at the school that year died due to soil problem. However, in the month of March, following year, the first anniversary of tree planting was celebrated and a new tree was planted. Mr. Nobuo Koike from Tokyo also participated in the event and gave a lecture. The location where the new tree was planted gets much sunlight and its soil is in good condition. The message role, introduced during the anniversary event, was very big in size, just impressive. The current length of the scroll is 35m and each student pasted “What happiness means to me” or “Message to my life-long friend” and so on inside the scroll. Pasted outside the scroll was the database such as newspaper articles of this year concerning peace issues, etc. As the more than 10 students carried it around within the event venue, the people cheered. Mothers of PTA members were also quite impressed by the work.
The 10-year-scroll message role was created by a few volunteered students and administration division of student council before the tree planting ceremony. Based on the concept of the Kaki Tree Project, it was carefully planned so that the project will be on-going and properly shared by all of the students for the period of 10 years, that is between the tree planting ceremony and harvest festival. Every year, a new scroll will be made and it will be 10 of them 10 years from now. To share a sense of achievement of the project with the students, the 10 scrolls will be connected and made in to one huge scroll of about 500m in length and will be presented at once at the harvest festival 10 years later. The persimmon tree keeps growing and every year peace study is conducted on 27th of February. The project is in progress and heading towards its 10th anniversary event.
