As an American visitor and Yuko, her Japanese friend, follow a lane through the rice fields, Yuko’s grandmother tells them of her childhood. As a young girl she loved cherry blossoms and the rising moon, but she especially “loved the deep KA-DOON of an ancient temple bell” that always rang at midnight on New Year’s Eve. After the war, when there were shortages of many things, she particularly missed the bell, which the town had donated to the war effort for its metal. Years later, she still misses the bell and is amazed to hear that it was never melted down and ended up in America. Now, Americans in Minnesota are sending the bell back to its home. Renamed the Peace Bell, it’s given a new tower in a hilltop park, where it rings in the “hope for peace in the hearts of people all over the world.” A final note tells the true account of a temple bell from the Japanese town of Ohara, which sat in the Duluth, Minnesota, City Hall for eight years following World War II. It was returned to Ohara in 1954 as a gesture of goodwill and renamed the American-Japanese Friendship Peace Bell. Japanese acrylic paints were used in Hideko Takahashi’s appealing illustrations. (Ages 6–10)

Yuko’s grandmother remembers that when she was a little girl many years ago in Japan, her town’s beautiful temple bell was taken away to be used as scrap metal for the war effort. She thought she’d never see it again. After the war the bell was brought to America by a U. S. Navy crew who found it abandoned in a Japanese shipyard. Most amazing of all, the bell was later returned to Japan as a gesture of friendship between the former warring countries. Told in evocative prose, this inspiring story based on the American-Japanese Friendship Peace Bell celebrates peace between nations.