Balloon Bomb

The paper in the balloon was made by schoolgirls. Japan pulled teenage students out of class to make washi for the balloons, and most never knew what it was for. Forty years after the six deaths here, Yuzuru Takeshita, a University of Michigan professor who had spent his teens in the Tule Lake camp sixty miles away, found some of those women and sent them the names and ages of the dead. In August 1987 his family carried a thousand paper cranes the women had folded to the Mitchell Monument. Some of the women later came to Bly themselves.

Where it stands