Students Rebuild invites you to join us for Gift by Gift for a Better World, a 3-day public ceremony and workshop at Sendai Train Station in Sendai, Japan. The centerpiece of the event is the magnificent Paper Crane Sculpture, designed by the students at the Tohoku University of Art & Design and composed of 100,000 of your paper cranes. After the installation is presented, young people and their families will gather to make gift boxes filled with paper cranes, to be given to children throughout Japan as a symbolic gift of hope and optimism!
Are you in the Sendai area? Join us!
Join us at S-pal Square in the Sendai Train Station at 10:15 AM on Friday, January 13th for the opening ceremony. The ceremony is being hosted by hundreds of students from schools across the region, including Tsutsujigaoka Elementary School 5th and 6th graders, Higashi Nibancho Elementary School 3rd graders, Sendai Central Community Center, Saiwaicho Community & Youth Center, Tohoku University of Art & Design, Tohoku Seikatsu Bunka College, and Miyagi University of Education!
Not in Japan? Don't worry! Event participants will be sharing live updates via our Paper Cranes for Japan Facebook Page. On Twitter? Follow us @studentsrebuild and join the event in spirit at #papercranes4japan.
Just one week left to go!
With only one week remaining before the big event, students at Tohoku University of Art & Design have packed up the final paper crane sculpture and are ready to deliver it to Sendai Train Station!
'Gift by Gift' Partners
Students Rebuild sends a tremendous thanks to our partners in Japan who have made this inspiring event possible:
- Kumiko Fujiwara, Chief Director of Supporting Organization for the Artists of Tohoku. SOAT supports local artists by providing art supplies, exhibition opportunities, and gallery space to Tohoku artists.
- Yota Hanazawa, Associate Professor at Tohoku University of Art and Design. Professor Hanazawa and his students have designed and constructed the Paper Crane Sculpture.
- Haruka Awano, Student Volunteer Leader. She's from Ishinomaki, the second largest city in Miyagi prefecture. Her family's house and business also got damaged by the tsunami. She wanted to participate in this project to give thanks to those helped her, her family and her family business to recover from the disaster.
- Taka Saito, Sendai Design Fellow for Architecture for Humanity's Tohoku Rebuilds Program.
- Reiji Ohe. A visual artist by training, Reiji will be documenting the workshop.
- Hatsumi Hoshizawa. Hatsumi has helped us to reach out to the community by designing posters and flyers for the event!
Children and their parents from the Children’s Art College at TUAD came to help the team again on December 14, 2011. This time, they started to work on the huge world map made of paper cranes.
This map will be displayed at the workshop in January as well.
Production of Paper Crane Sculpture is full swing! Professor Hanazawa and his students got huge help from children and their parents from Children's Art College at Tohoku University of Art and Design. Prof. Hanazawa is the director of the Research Center for Children Art Education, which Children's Art College is a part of.
Children helped to decorate gift boxes with paper cranes. These boxes will be a part of display at the workshop in January, and be sent out to local schools as gift after the workshop with a sign saying that these beautiful paper cranes flew from all over the world.
The students are giving finishing touches to the streamers.
Now they are going to start making the world map made with paper cranes!
Professor Youta Hanazawa and the students at Tohoku University of Art and Design (TUAD) received the early Christmas gift -- 100,000 paper cranes!
After they opened all boxes and admired all the work that children all over the world put in, they came up with the final design of the paper crane sculpture. We are going to have a big installation created by the TUAD students, and hold a workshop with local children between January 13th and 15th in Sendai. The title of the workshop is “Gift by Gift for a Better World”. At the workshop, children are going to make gift boxes filled with paper cranes and decorate them. These gift boxes are going to be sent to local schools as gifts from children all over the world. Come join us if you are in Sendai area in January!
Yamagata Shimbun (Yamagata Newspaper) ran the article about our paper crane sculpture project on November 24, 2011!
The man on the right is Professor Hanazawa. The girl sitting next to him is Ms. Haruka Awano, the student leader. Her family's business was also affected by the tsunami, so she wanted to give children hope through this project.
Professor Hanazawa and his students at TUAD just sent us a couple of pictures that they took when the first box of paper cranes arrived from the United States. They just went in and start thinking about what they can make with these beautiful paper cranes that were folded by children all over the world!
Students checking these beautiful paper cranes and getting inspired!
What can we make with these cranes? Sendai has tradition to make giant streamers with paper cranes every summer. The streamers are symbol of longevity.
Or a huge mural? They are thinking about using a fishing net to attach paper cranes.
Stay tuned for the progress!!!
Kumiko Fujiwara, the head director at Supporting Organization for Artists of Tohoku (SOAT) found the site for the paper crane sculpture. It is going to be at the ground floor of Sendai Station.
Yota Hanazawa, the professor at Tohoku University of Art and Design (TUAD) and his assistant Koji Sakuta came up with the conceptual design of the installation.
With Kumiko's initiative, Prof. Hanazawa and Mr. Sakuta will also organize on-site workshop with local elementary school students to create artwork. It will be exhibited along the main sculpture that TUAD students will work on campus under guidance of Prof. Hanazawa and Mr. Sakuta.
The workshop and exhibition are scheduled from February 1, 2012 to February 5, 2012. After the period, we are planning on relocating those sculptures to one or more schools in the area.
One more day left for the Paper Crane Sculpture Workshop in Sendai. We had many students with their parents attended the second day of the workshop event on January 14, 2012. One participant told us that she would like to thank everybody who made these paper cranes, and wished her town to be fully recover from the disaster soon.
Tomorrow (January 15, 2012) is going to be the last day of this 3-day event. We will display the completed gift boxes as well as the paper crane world. Then the gift boxes will be sent to local schools and youth centers in Sendai.
And here is a short movie of the opening ceremony that filmed by the design fellow of Architecture for Humanity in Sendai. We will share a film of the entire 3-day event soon, and this is a sneak preview! Stay tuned.