THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: JAPAN-USA WFWP SISTERHOOD CEREMONIES BEGIN, JANUARY 22, 1995

Originally posted at http://familyfed.org

Beginning on January 22, 1995, and extending to March 8, four thousand Japanese women traveled to Washington, D.C., to be paired with an equal number of American women in eight sisterhood ceremonies sponsored by the Women’s Federation for World Peace (WFWP). These were set to coincide with the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Each ceremony included a dramatic “bridge-crossing” during which a representative group of the Japanese delegates crossed over a special bridge and met their American counterparts in the middle, where each bowed, embraced the other, and then walked down together, hand in hand. Following the highly successful Washington, D.C., conferences, WFWP sponsored Japanese-American sisterhood ceremonies in eight U.S. cities during the remainder of 1995, with several thousand more women from both countries participating. In 1996, WFWP conducted a number of “African-American/Caucasian-American” ceremonies. Activities in the United States inspired Austrian-Croatian, Czech-German, Russian-German, Hungarian-Slovakian, and Italian-Slovakian sisterhood ceremonies conducted by WFWP chapters in Europe.