Peace pole

A peace pole is a monument that displays the message "May Peace Prevail on Earth" in the language of the country where it has been placed, and usually 3 to 13 additional translations. The message often is referred to as a peace prayer.

The idea of peace poles was first thought up by Masahisa Goi in 1955 in Japan. The peace pole project today is promoted by The World Peace Prayer Society as well as other groups and individuals. The first peace poles outside Japan were constructed in 1983.^[1] Since then, more than 200,000 have been placed around the world in close to 200 countries.^[1]

Peace poles are made of many materials; most are made of wood, while others are made of limestone, copper, plastic or stainless steel. The text might be painted, carved, etched, welded, pasted, or riveted on, or it might simply be a plastic plaque attached with screws. In other cases, it is the careful work of an artist or sculptor.

Sometimes the word prayer is avoided so that peace poles are not regarded as religious objects therefore violating zoning restrictions. For example, a Quaker group in New York City ran into this problem year after year, and did not get permission to plant a peace pole in a park.^{[citation needed]}

Peace poles have been placed in such notable locations as the north magnetic pole, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the site of the Egyptian pyramids in Giza, and the Aiki Shrine in Iwama, Japan.^[2] Peace poles are commonly installed at high-profile public gathering places, such as community parks or near the entrances of churches or schools. In one case, a garden, created for a wedding, was designed around the peace pole that was its centerpiece. The Republic of Molossia, a micronation, has a peace pole in eight languages.^[3] The University of California, Los Angeles has a limestone peace pole with 14 languages directly in front of Kerckhoff Hall.

The initial inspiration for planting a peace pole often is as a response to a local historic hate crime, incident or issue. The world's second-largest peace pole, at 52 feet (16 m),^[4] is located in Janesville, Wisconsin, at the site of a 1992 KKK rally (Saturday, May 30).^[5]^[6]^[7] Another of the largest peace poles in the world, as measured in tons, is the granite peace pole in Beech Acres Park^[8] near Cincinnati, Ohio, inspired by hate literature left in the driveways of Jewish residents.

In September 2016, the World Peace Prayer Society and the Little Free Library project announced a collaboration to offer a new peace pole library structure. It features the standard peace pole message of peace – "May Peace Prevail on Earth" – in a six-foot library. Some of these new libraries were installed at locations significant to the civil rights movement, such as the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.^[9]^[10]

A former grain elevator in Minneapolis is painted as a gigantic peace pole

The message in each language

The multilingual inscription of a peace pole constitutes a parallel text with top-to-bottom sentences. Each one is usually shown:

rotated clockwise in languages using LTR scripts (English, Latin, ...)
rotated counterclockwise in languages using RTL scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, ...)
arranged vertically in languages using East Asian scripts (Japanese, Chinese, ...)

They can be set in different case styles (sentence case, title case all caps, small caps), even on a single pole.

Gallery

Peace pole in Spokane's Finch Arboretum, Washington
The tallest (16.5 m (54 ft)) peace pole in the world on the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. It is made of a 105 years old Sapele tree. 5 languages (Twi—a local language in Ghana, Hindi, Chinese, Swahili, and Arabic) have been used to express the peace prayer on the pole: "May Peace Be on Earth".
Peace Pole in 12 languages at Alverno College, Milwaukee
Peace pole at a church in Valparaiso, Indiana. Displays the Japanese text rotated, not arranged vertically.
Monument in memory of the 1998 embassy bomb blast victims from Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Shows an unusual vertical arrangement of the engraved text.
Peace pole planted in Argotti Botanic Gardens (Floriana, Malta)
Peace marker with abbreviated texts in Dortmund, Germany
Peace marker with abbreviated texts in Neuenrade, Germany
Peace Pole and Cherry Tree planted by Hiroshima Survivors at Faslane Peace Camp, Scotland (on 6 August 1985)